Panama and the Canal in Picture and ProseAbbot, Willis J. (Willis John)
History
Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose
Abbot, Willis J. (Willis John)
Panama Canal (Panama) -- History
The waters of the lake cover 164 square miles and are at points
eighty-five feet deep. In the main this vast expanse of water, one of
the largest of artificial reservoirs, containing about 183 billion cubic
feet of water, is supplied by the Chagres River, though several smaller
streams add to its volume. Before the dam was built two or three score
yards measured the Chagres at its widest point. Now the waters are
backed up into the interior far beyond the borders of the Canal Zone,
along the course of every little waterway that flowed into the Chagres,
and busy launches may ply above the sites of buried Indian towns. The
towns themselves will not be submerged, for the cane and palm-thatched
huts will float away on the rising tide. Indeed from the ships little
sign of native life will appear, unless it be Indians in cayucas making
their way to market. For the announced policy of the government is to
depopulate the Zone. All the Indian rights to the soil have been
purchased and the inhabitants remorselessly ordered to move out beyond
the five-mile strip on either side of the canal. This is unfortunate as
it will rob the trip of what might have been a scenic feature, for the
Indians love to build their villages near the water, which is in fact
their principal highway, and but for this prohibition would probably
rebuild as near the sites of their obliterated towns as the waters would
permit.
In passing through the lake the canal describes eight angles, and the
attentive traveler will find interest in watching the range lights by
which the ship is guided when navigating the channel by day or by
night--for there need be no cessation of passage because of darkness.
These range lights are lighthouses of reënforced concrete so placed in
pairs that one towers above the other at a distance back of the lower
one of several hundred feet. The pilot keeping these two in line will
know he is keeping to the center of his channel until the appearance of
two others on either port or starboard bow warns him that the time has
come to turn. The towers are of graceful design, and to come upon one
springing sixty feet or more into the air from a dense jungle clustering
about its very base is to have a new experience in the picturesque. They
will need no resident light keepers, for most are on a general electric
light circuit. Some of the more inaccessible however are stocked with
compressed acetylene which will burn over six months without recharging.
The whole canal indeed from its beginning miles out in the Atlantic to
its end under the blue Pacific will be lighted with buoys, beacons,
lighthouses and light posts along the locks until its course is almost
as easily followed as a “great white way.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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